It is desirable in many situations to record voice communications, such as telephone calls. This is particularly so in a contact center environment in which many agents may be handling hundreds of telephone calls each day. Recording of these telephone calls can allow for quality assessment of agents, improvement of agent skills, dispute resolution, and can provide additional benefits.
Recording systems that record telephone calls and allow users of the systems to search for specified calls based on one or more call attributes are well known. Generally, recordings matching a set of criteria are displayed for a user to review details of the calls and as a guide in selecting calls that they wish to replay. When searching for a particular utterance within a call, the user will listen to the replay of the call until they hear the particular utterance-of-interest.
In many cases, a user is asked to retrieve a recording related to a specified event. For example, a contact center reviewer may be asked to identify whether a contact center employee or a customer said something during a call or calls. Often the precise details of which call or calls is required are insufficient to identify a single call from the set of all recorded calls. Consequently, a number of calls must be reviewed manually to identify the required call or calls. In very few cases, the user will recall or otherwise know when within a call the event/utterance-of-interest occurred. Typically, the user has to review the call by replaying the recording from beginning to end at the rate the call was recorded or by fast-forwarding to pass over portions of the call to home in on the portion of the call where the utterance-of-interest occurred.
The most time consuming case occurs when the user is trying to prove that an utterance-of-interest was not said. When faced with this scenario, the user is forced to listen to all of the identified calls (i.e., the calls that met the initial search criteria). Such searches are time consuming and prone to error. Especially when the initial search criteria are insufficient to identify a set of calls with a manageable number of calls and many hours of recordings have to be reviewed.
Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.